Blog Archives

I live in Somerville, a city near Boston that is rapidly gentrifying. It seems like a pretty good place to think about the implications of Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, or COST system, that Eric Posner and Glen Weyl sketch out in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (Princeton, 2018) The example they give is Rio de Janeiro, but their notion of “perpetual auctioning” easier to imagine think in a place close to home. Here’s the “thought experiment” the authors propose. Suppose the entire city of Rio is perpetually up for auction. Imagine that every building, business,…

The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers (Simon & Schuster, 2015), by Gillian Tett

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse (Random House, 2016) by Mohamed El-Erian

The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age (Harvard, 2014), by Russell Muirhead

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton, 2016), by William Goetzmann

From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives (Harper, 2016), by Jeffrey Garten

When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (Harvard, 2002), by David Moss

How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network (Princeton, 2015), by Shane Greenstein

Financial Risk Management for Dummies (Wiley, 2015), by Aaron Brown,

The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools (Houghton Mifflin,2015), by Dale Russelhof

A History of Macroeconomics: From Keynes to Lucas and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2015), by Michel De Vroey

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science (Norton, 2015), by Dani Rodrik

Learning By Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages and Wealth (Yale, 2015), by James Bessen

Let Me Heal: The Opportunity to Preserve Excellence in American Medicine (Oxford, 2015), by Kenneth Ludmerer

My Soul is Among Lions: Pages from the Breast Casncer Archives (Amazon, 2013), by Ellen Leopold

The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of American Defense Strategy (Basic, 2015), by Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts

The Promise of Party in a Polarized World (Harvard, 2014), by Russell Muirhead

Genealogy of American Finance (Columbia, 2015), by Robert E. Wright and Richard Sylla

The Maze of Banking (Oxford, 2015), by Gary B. Gorton

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (Norton, 2015), by Richard Thaler

When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 (Penguin, 2015), by Tony Judt

American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church (Public Affairs, 2014), by Alex Beam
Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy (Princeton, 2015), by Jeffrey Frieden

The Mystery of the Invisible Hand: A Henry Spearman Mystery (Princeton, 2014), by Marshall Jevons